Greeley, Colorado January 17, 2003 Michael Welsh (MW): …what about your [inaudible at 000].
Bill Southard (BS): Mine is a, 240 acre farm, out here, it’s a…town north, a little bit west of Seeley’s Lake, I’ll show you on the map just where it is. But uh, March 3, 1873, Congress passed this tree claim act, entitled “An Act to Encourage Growth of Timber on Western Prairies.”
MW: Was that called the Timber Culture Act? Was that the formal name? BS: Tree Claims.
MW: Tree Claims? The Tree Claim Act.
BS: Yeah, the timber, call it tree claim. Now the uh, [clears throat] their thought was, that
the…they were in the westerly wind belt, and if they had a lot of trans-evaporation from the trees here, and we get the irrigation from the mountains, uh, there’s…the uh, comes down, you see. Uh, here’s…there’re a lot of little tributaries that comes down into these rivers, among them the Poudre.
MW: Um hum.
BS: And uh…uh, they could then get these forests, and that would increase the precipitation in Nebraska and Kansas.
MW: Yes.
BS: And um, on the contrary, in about 1970s why we had quite an urge on to uh, do cloud seeding. And there’s still some of it going on in some other…I went to a ditch meeting yesterday, and they brought that up there. But it’s not followed very much. And um…they built…one of the complaints of that is that, out in Illinois, we’re takin’ the water out and precipitating it down in our area, then it doesn’t go on and water, uh, rain in Iowa and Illinois. MW: Yes.
BS: That’s, I mean, you see the, the context on it. MW: Yes.
BS: Well, timber culture act was uh, uh, repealed, and I’ve got a thing here says when, but it, yeah, it was repealed in 1891, and from ’73 to ’91. Now, he didn’t get his patent issued until I think it’s ’92 there. And he was dead, they issued it to his heirs, it says there as you can see. When they get through in that room I’ll show you the overall pictures of it.
MW: Sure.
BS: Now those were some interesting things to me on it, and then currently an effort, there’s just publicity about it, currently, that they’re going to be going to Nebraska and load up the train with water. And then pull the train out here and dump the water.
MW: Just big tanker cars?
BS: Yeah, tanker cars. That was their thought. But I don’t think that’s gonna go over. Now, through the time we’ve had [inaudible at 028] we have what we call a general adjudications, and this they set it up in water districts, and the Poudre was initially water district three.
MW: Yes.
BS: Now they’ve changed that from districts to divisions, and the entire northeast part of the state, the South Platte drainage, is all in. And there’s the Arickaree, and some of those others out on the plains. And this is in water division one. And the headquarters in our district court in Greeley. Now, district three, when it was the old districts, was in Larimer County. There the very
famous adjudication, with the general adjudication, was made by Judge Claude Coffin… MW: Spelled like the coffin?
BS: C-O-F-F-I-N. And the…his general adjudication, I was kind of in on it because I was
interested in water and…there were three of us; Bill Kelly, Clay Apple [? at 040] who’s deceased now, and I went to Judge Coffin and suggested that we look at the well situations, since he was having a general adjudication and they were having a lot of wells, and that he consider different characteristics of those which are close to the river, obviously a part of the river, they support the surface stream, and they would be tributary wells, and they’d be subject to his decree. And then he could get those that were further away, and the very skeptical as to what if any could be said to be a tributary and support the surface stream, and so he had a number of non-tributary wells. Now this file here…
MW: [Whistles].
BS: …is basically complete with just the ones that I handled. MW: Yes.
BS: Here’s one; Robert A. Rundle and James…eh, Jane Rundle, and they…some of these are deeds and so forth on those. But these laws, and [inaudible at 052] currently, and will be somewhat of a question. See…
MW: Certainly getting a lot of [inaudible at 053].
BS: The general adjudication was done mainly in ’52, and these general decree was September 10, 1953. And that was in Larimer County, at Fort Collins, District Court #1172…not 11, 217. And here’s a copy of it. Now, the state legislature had the water rights determination and adjudication act of 1969, in which they set up these divisions and established a water court, separate division of the district court, and that would be located in Greeley, for water division 1. Now, as a result of that, we…and there was those of the three of us that were still alive at that time went to the new water judge, Judge Donald A. Carpenter, whose father Delph Carpenter was very famed for establishing the Colorado River Compact. He was the one who thought up the idea of a treaty between states, so we have those interstate compacts, everything from transportation to health, and of course water, how the states vary with each other, how they operate their borders, and so forth.
MW: Um hum, yes. And that compact’s in the news these days to.
BS: Yes. And now the…so interestingly, the birthplace of interstate compacts with Greeley, Colorado and a lawyer here, Delph Carpenter. Now, with Donald A. Carpenter, we went to him with the idea that we should carry on Coffin’s work that he did in his adjudication, and so he considered the findings, conclusions, and decree, which he made, of [inaudible at 074] ‘bout ’73 or ‘4 they found it. This was the draft of it, where he recognized Coffin’s decree, approved it, re-decreed it, everything repeated. He confirmed it and adopted it, and…that the [inaudible at 079] water district number 3 and the water division number 1, in water division 1, as affects the statute, consists of all the lands irrigated from the ditches taking water from the Cache la Poudre and its tributaries, which was in its terms, includes lands in the certain townships here. From the Cache la Poudre Irrigating Company’s canals or those Greeley Number 2 canal, um, water’s there. In order that the rights of all parties concerned more definitely ascertained, determined, and settled, without further extended court procedures, this court hereby adopts, approves, ratifies, confirms, and re-declares the findings and conclusions of Carpenter…er Coffin. Now that’s the basic thing. Now that went to [inaudible at 088] in ’53, and it was re-adopted in the early ‘70s. Now was that…30 years since then, and I think now it would be most difficult if someone were to attack those complement wells. But they are subject to being attacked, we have
some people now that the water court, in a preceding just last week, Hays, who just retired… MW: Yes.
BS: …decreed that the [inaudible at 095] did not have authority to do that. Now our state engineer is a single administrative officer of the state, and lots of times they feel their oats, they have their muscle, and they…I’m having a current issue with them, I just took one cutting from the Denver Post yesterday to put in here about the security clearance for [inaudible at 099]. Now I digress a little bit from what maybe you wanted to…
MW: Go right ahead. We can have more conversations; we’ll talk [inaudible at 101].
BS: There’s a closed groundwater basin up there on East Crow Creek, which is up in the Grover-Hereford area, and it’s a closed water basin, there’s no outlet for it, underground basin.
MW: How far does that stretch?
BS: Some distance, the extents of it are not completely known. And you’ll see when I get to it. Now, in the middle of all this, I’ve appeared to…I did not personally appear, but I did in it by documents, in a proceeding where somebody wanted to create a new well in that area. And my lady rancher thought that they’re going to [inaudible at 111] everything, that she objected, along with several others. There were several people. The objection is the too many fingers in the pie sort of thing. And among the things that I’ve tried to raise an issue with was just what happened a little over a month ago, if you read the paper, remember there were three nuns that were caught going into the intercontinental ballistic missile sites! North of New Raymer, cutting the fence and all. The military arrested them, the military out at Fort [inaudible at 116] and within 40 minutes of when they cut the chain they had them and took them down to the Weld County Jail here, thinking for trespass, and the feds came up and gobbled ‘em up ‘cause that’s a federal offence. Now, my contention was, a repeat of the thing, which I had in the early ‘80s, night before last I just saw Judge Berman, Robert Berman who was our first water judge here. He wasn’t the first water judge, but he succeeded Carpenter. Tells me he remembered it. We tried to spook someone, a Denver lawyer, from trying to get some more wells up there, but saying these intercontinental ballistic missile sites have some geology and surface of the earth there which is a little bit unique, because our national defense had the entire surface of the earth, and they could even do it in the oceans, to establish these intercontinental ballistic missiles. Now for instance, we had one here out at the west of Greeley, not quite as far west as I-25 but about three or four miles this way, it’d be southeast of Windsor. But it was on a kind of a bluff there. The old prisoner of war camp was out there during the war and they abandoned that, and gave it to Weld County for storage. It’s got good, dry space there for the old wrecker. And some of the talk at that time was well, that particular missile was aimed at the east door of the Kremlin.
MW: Hmm.
BS: I mean, that’s the sophistication they kept talking about. I told Berman, I said that why can’t we turn these people off if we’d ask them to have security clearance at every place? On security clearance, they trace all your history including that of your family, and if your wife had a library book that she had two days late returning, and she didn’t pay the 22-cent fine, it’d be on the record. And people didn’t want that done. And yesterday’s Denver Post was an article about security clearance, how it affects people trying to get jobs. And I learned from that it’s more than just filling out the papers.
MW: Sure.
BS: But I said that they should get those clearanced because the range geology…why did they pick that spot for highly sophisticated weaponry? And they picked of all the spots up there, north of New Raymer and most of this area. Now, would Saddam Hussein like to know what’s the
geology down there about three or four hundred feet down from this? But would it take a burst 30,000 feet in the air to disable all those missiles? Would it take a shot only if you aimed it at that one and the lid on the silo was open? I don’t know. But those things. And we don’t want people monkeying around and getting that information out there, it should be security. MW: That’s a very interesting question about the…
BS: I can…so I objected to that, and the water referee in the State Engineer’s Office…not the referee, the hearing officer, he said just this newspaper article about those nun’s is not enough to have him require security clearance. Now Berman, I’ll always remember this, Berman told me, he said well, I can, speaking of himself, he could pass security clearance. He knew, because he was on Stillwell’s staff in Burma during the war.
MW: Oh boy.
BS: And they asked me, well yeah, I had some touchy things now and then. [Inaudible at 159] four years ago. So the…we were kind of joking at the time, but how we scared those Denver lawyers out of it on that. Now, that has very little to do with the Poudre River.
MW: That’s a fascinating example of the groundwater issues that are out there.
BS: And the thing that I didn’t want was to have every Tom, Dick and Harry well-drillers here getting all that information and…it might be used for improper purposes. So that was what I had. Now, the [inaudible at 167] are they still in there?
Unknown Female Voice: No, they’re…
Tape shuts off briefly at 168
BS: Uh, the Laramie River and where it dumps into the Poudre River, now mind you, that is not native water of the Poudre, and you should be able to do whatever the hell you want to do with that, you can consume it all. But uh, the Weld Supply and Storage owned two thirds of it, and paid two thirds of the expense, Windsor paid one third, and supposedly owned one third, but various agreements that they had going through it, they only got thirteen percent of the water! You pay a third of the expense of the thing. Poor Windsor Reservoir Company was two and a half million dollars in debt, and they’re worried about the shareholders meeting, and how they can…and we had a lot of dealings with the water supply storage company had pretty well
organized and ushered [? at 179] the Windsor people out, so they paid one third of it and only got 13 percent of the water.
MW: That’s a very difficult situation for the…
BS: Yeah. Now, um…[inaudible at 183] Carpenter…that was some of the things that I was talking about on general things on the Poudre. Now, when you’re talking about everything from the boy scout camp that was up there on the Poudre and uh, there was a lot of ties with Greeley and all the area here, with oh, camping and recreation and that kind of thing on the Poudre. ‘Course Chambers Lake and then there’s the lakes up there, some of them were excellent fishing and some of them were not. Most of them were good fly-fishing streams, and the wildlife people kept circulating stuff there. And uh, I’m not certain that I’ve got…I’m talking about anything that you’re interested in.
MW: No, no…this is fine. We need lots of background, and we need to think about the reasons people wanted to live along the river and use the river and things like that. This is very helpful. BS: Now for instance, we’ve got one thing we can’t be too proud of, what we do as citizens, but we have the Spanish Colony, as we call that [inaudible at 196]. And uh, it was established by the Great Western Sugar Company to provide beet workers…to have them. Now of course, those
people all stay here all year long, many of them way beyond just the field work. Now on this tree claim farm I have an interesting tenant there, Silviano Munoz, and he first came to the United States at age four, working in the fields in California. And then later came up here and
interesting, his sponsor, who saw what he was and tried to help him along, was Paul Hoshiko. MW: Whoah…yesss.
BS: Dennis’s father. He’s dead now. But he was there. Now, this Silviano has one tremendous asset. He’s a very fine mechanic, but his is illiterate. And how he can work with the sophisticated power take-off, hydraulic take-off, the pneumatic take-off, all the power transmissions, in these tractors, and not be able to read the manual on it. But, he had one excellent thing. He married well.
MW: Really.
BS: Now Elidia, his wife, they have three boys and three girls, but she is extremely bright and she of course does all the bookkeeping, all the writing and everything. He lived [inaudible at 221]. Here’s looking north. Here’s Seeley’s Lake and here’s Eaton, this is the so-called Jim Brown corner. Now just a few feet over is where Highway 85 runs, about two blocks over here. And that’s the only stoplight in Eaton. Now, among the farms I still have, I got two, one is this Anne Virden-Charles Southard, this is a timber culture, the tree claim farm, and this one is a…I used to own this one, this is a…I still own that, that’s a quarter section, but it has a very
interesting thing through it. This is the Graham-Seaton Ditch. In 1880, when the Eaton Ditch, Larimer-Weld Irrigation Company Ditch came in…by the way, let me locate you. This is the number two, the Cache la Poudre Irrigating Company. Here’s Ness Lake over here. Here’s Seeley’s Lake, here’s where Dick Monfort lives…
MW: Yes.
BS: There’s a little bit of a hill in here, and when the Eaton Ditch came in in roughly 1880, it began to fill into the tight soils there and make them seepy. And J.G. Graham owned some land down here by Seeley’s Lake, and then he visualized that he could go up here on this and he could cut through this, about that distance, he could cut through that and that’s about a 30 foot cut in the mountain, and then he could develop the water, drain that, and that’s what he did. It goes up there, the Graham-Seaton ditch goes up as far as that Eaton hay mill, which is up there west of Eaton. Now, this…we’ve had various troubles with this, but they cut through there and then they made the Graham-Seaton Ditch Company, had to maintain one bridge so he could get across to the east part of it, and also that they were to take care of the…what’s the word where
they….erode, they’d take care of the erosion caused by that deep cut. And then later why the…I got it, and I leveled that thing out, and got [inaudible at 261] who agreed to take care of any of the erosion and getting on that ditch. There isn’t very much, it’s not deep there at [inaudible at 263] but it is at the upper end of this place. Now I’m trustee for my sister on it there, on the title. And that’s clearly developed water, because it was never…never get to the river, there’s just his seeping up all this area. Big, big area. This is the map 9…[inaudible at 268] going up here, here’s the Eaton Ditch you see. And going along in there why, it’s just seeping all that area. And what saved it was that Graham-Seaton Ditch. Now the state engineer is trying to gobble up that water, and we got it decreed and all, fortunately, and we’ve got a contract on it. So actually we have the right to use some of that water. It is very valuable, it saved our skin this year.
MW: Really.
BS: But on this farm here, on the property map, but um…now let’s see, what else? You’ve got a lot of questions.
two…
BS: Anything I can do.
MW: I wonder if you can give me just a couple more, maybe another thirty minutes or so here for this thing.
BS: I’m fine with this.
MW: Well, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about your own family, you know, how you got to this. Why’d your family come to the Greeley area? Why’d they settle when they did? BS: My father’s mother’s family were the Rowes, it’s John A. Rowe. Did you see that family on this? The timber culture [inaudible at 286].
MW: Yes, I saw that. R-O-W-E. Yeah.
BS: And uh, he died before his patent was issued, so it was issued to his heirs. Interesting. One of them was my father’s mother, there were eight children in that family and he, my grandfather and my father and my grandmother bought out the other members of the family. Now actually, about me and my end of it, I was adopted.
MW: Ohhhh. Ok.
BS: I was born in Sharon, Connecticut, I guess [inaudible at 298] nobody wanted me, so I ended up in an orphanage or some [inaudible at 299] in New York City. And my mother was brought up in New Jersey, she went through Wellesley, and then was very musical so she went to the Metropolitan Opera House.
MW: Wait a minute. She went to Wellesley? BS: Yeah, graduated from Wellesley, and then… MW: And then sang opera in New York?
BS: She was not much of a singer, but she was a piano player, and organ, and very interested in overall music. And my father was a lawyer here in Greeley, and at the time my mother took one year out of Wellesley and went to Colorado College. She met my father at that time, and they got married in 1909 [inaudible at 318] after she got through. She was in the class of ’03 at Wellesley. Anyway, they uh…my father was brought up, was born in Erie here, and he was brought up in Greeley. And my grandfather built this house here and my sister recently died, she was in there. And what the hell did I do with that thing now? It now belongs to my two nephews, one of whom is a PhD doctor, and he’s working on some government things. But he’s here right now because my other nephew, his brother, is up in the hospital at Estes. [Inaudible at 323]. MW: Mmm, ok.
BS: He’s uh, cancer of the lung, and they took one lung out and the cancer’s in the other one [inaudible at 325]. Gulp, gulp, gulp. And I don’t know, it’s…
MW: So did you grow up in town, then? You didn’t…
BS: It’s right out on the farm? No. No, I grew up here in Greeley.
MW: How did you wind up getting to Greeley though from the orphanage in New York? BS: My mother, er father was in law practice here, and my mother went back and picked me up for an adoption I guess, and Spence [? at 332] was the name of the orphanage or whatever it was, child-placement in New York City. And I came out here and was adopted, then they adopted three other children so I had a sister, two sisters and a brother. I went through school here in Greeley.
MW: College High or Greeley High?
BS: Greeley High. And I started out my first education here was in kindergarten at the, at that time the teacher’s college.
BS: Um…See I was born in ’16, and so… MW: ’21?
BS: Would have been about 1921. Genevieve Lightford [? at 345] I know was the teacher in kindergarten. So my education commenced at the UNC, and I ended up, I was on the board of trustees, at the University here…
MW: Really?
BS: Down at ’65-71, then when they got their own separate board, that was the [inaudible at 348]…state colleges in Colorado. Western State and Adams State, Southern Colorado State College and Metro. I was on there the first year that Metro started, at UNC. And of course was the Colorado State College of Education. And I, my college was at CU, and I was…I went to law school at Harvard, finished there in ’41 and immediately in’42 war had started and I was drafted. And of course, I was one of those lucky fellows that was drafted March 28, 1942, and March 29, 1942, at four o’clock in the morning shake me on the shoulders you’re on KP.
MW: Wow, wow.
BS: Uh, [inaudible at 361] that day. MW: Really, yeah.
BS: I was in the army for four years, and wound up in Europe, well I was never in any extensive engagements. This was the thing I did in the Army, I…comin’ from little Greeley, Colorado, I…when I was an officer in my first assignment, attached to this battalion…after I got my first assignment, and went through basic training, I’d gotten mechanic. And damn if they didn’t, because of my education decided to use me in the Air Force, so they got me in one and I’m not even good at washing airplanes or anything mechanical. And so they [inaudible at 373] this little, short…he was a fighter pilot, he was crackerjack, he was relatively young and he lined up about a dozen of us, we were not doing anything, we’re just like a staff sergeant’s orderlies. So the first one he asked what’d you do in civilian life that would be of any use to this organization? And the guy said I was an undertaker. And they were all flying those, these were those P-38’s with
[inaudible at 381] and anything goes wrong you jump out and that tailpiece drops and you’re gone. So that was interesting. But then I went to OCS, I was assigned to this battalion in
California, out in Los Angeles area. I got off the train and where the hell are…protocol. They’d always send someone down to pick you up, you’ve got to wire ahead to the commanding officer to arriving and such and such. And so I looked around and this little colored soldier came up. Are you Lieutenant Southard? He asked. We had segregated units at the time. And I was brought up in Greeley, and had basically one family of black people. And ole’ Bill Alexander and his sister Olivia never bothered anybody and they were accepted, the girls didn’t go dating, they didn’t do any cross-dating or anything, but it was…so I had no prejudices, biases or anything else but, I was with them for basically a year, and they uh…I got my fill of what goes on in that place. We had this…a battalion, roughly 900 enlisted men and twenty white officers.
MW: So you served in a black unit… BS: For a year.
MW: For three years.
BS: For a year. But we had at one time 380 of ‘em, we were trying to teach them how to read and write. Illiterate. Where did they come from? The majority of them came from around Sherman, Texas, east Texas oil field, one of the richest places in the world, for had the oil taxations to support education. Now I remember one guy came in there, he was on a stretcher, he came in from the reception center. [Inaudible at 412]. And…he came in, he’d had some burns, like oh, two, three years before, they had pretty well destroyed the skin on his belly. And he’d swallow
coffee or something that was dark you know, and his…it was not wet, but there’s a…you could see clear right through it there, he’d get the swallow through his guts, see this coffee going through. And we couldn’t do anything with him, so we [inaudible at 423] a good two, three weeks to get him a discharge, send him back. But he took the place of a white draftee on that Sherman, Texas draft board.
MW: Really.
BS: I knew we could see right away what the hell was going on. We’ve got all of the, and uh, that was a great experience, really, [inaudible at 428].
MW: Sure.
BS: And uh, most of the time we were in California and [inaudible at 430] I’d say about a third of the time, the rest of it we were in Arizona. But just interior guard duty at various…we had a refinery that we guarded, we had a mine and stuff they processed, [inaudible at 436]. At Ajo, Arizona, at an outpost. You know what it means.
MW: Yes, it’s garlic, isn’t it? BS: Ajo?
MW: Ajo is the… BS: Asshole.
MW: Oh, is that what it means? Ok, all right.
BS: Anyway, um, then I was assigned because of my, I don’t know why, education or
something, I was in the military police corp. And I got the prisoner of war thing. And then I got into some good opportunities there, I had these prisoners of war, and we were in a Navy camp, Bad Boy Navy. And we had uh Bitsy Googenburger [? At 450], who was the highest scoring submarine ace, they were all navy. Uh, German Navy. And they had Jurgen Wattenberg, who was married to Donutz’s daughter, Donutz’s the guy who took over when uh, he was head of the German Navy, and took over when Adolf was gone. So I had some hot shots. And I did one interesting thing, we had to try to find work, something for them to do, and remember the
Geneva Convention, you cannot have them build munitions or anything like that. And they’re far away so they escape problem, although we had a lot of escapes. All the big boys [inaudible at 465], that’s part of their job. And uh, I was, one guy didn’t actually escape, but I went down and got him and brought him back. Jurgen Wattenberg is…no, not Jurgen, Willy….anyway, the submarine ace, I can’t remember his name now and I just said it. And uh, what I did, I went down to the desert training center, and in the course of that they had a tremendous number of vehicles that got wrecked, and they try to get some salvage out of them. So I got the Phoenix, the fairgrounds which were vacant at the time you see, and we used those buildings and got some German engineers to take those parts apart and to clean them, and then they had across the other side of town, that the Germans didn’t know about, this was the Italian service unit [inaudible at 487].
MW: That’s right, yes.
BS: And we had those Italians, which were not very good mechanics, but they were reassembling the parts that the Germans had salvaged, and they were reusable back in the military. And who was in charge of our program, it was a Brigadier General, and that quite took his fancy, the way we’d worked that out, and we had it worked out fine. And it was just
something for them to do. MW: It’s amazing the ex-…
BS: We were a, did I say we were a camp, not an agricultural people like the prisoner-of-war camp that was out west of town.
MW: Farm labor.
BS: Farm labor. But uh…
MW: Well could you, could you just give me a couple of memories real quick, before we wrap this section up here, your childhood must have been real interesting. I can see how the war, you know, it taught you a lot about the things you’ll want to do when you come back, but can…I interviewed W.D. Farr a couple months ago, because he was older, a little older than you, and his father’s a banker. So he saw…
BS: [inaudible at 510] a farmer. MW: Well, he was the banker. W.D.
BS: Bill was an [inaudible at 512] number of things, but he never actually worked in a bank. MW: Ok. But he was saying that the 1930s were really tough. Could you give me a couple of thoughts of what your memories are, was there any water left in the river by the end of the summer?
BS: I was in high school, I finished 1934. [Long pause]. My father had a lot of farmland, he had three places under the Cotton Valley irrigation, southeast of La Salle, he had two places out here west of Greeley, one of them was very close to Greeley and the other’s further. And he had three places under the Eaton Ditch, we had this place which my nephews just recently sold into
[inaudible at 538]. By this place here, and the timber culture act. And then we had three places under the Weld Supply and Storage, which is the Ault ditch, and then he had three dry land sections, up there east, er west of Pierce. And he had a ranch down at Larkspur, but he didn’t do very much on that, this was a little far away. But he had more than he could actually manage and take care of…
End of Side A
BS: …three farms under the water supply and storage and the three farms under the Eaton ditch that he uh, I don’t know, his premonition was that I was not going to be coming back and
running it. When Thornton had that deal about buying all the farms up there by Ault, they bought roughly a hundred farms, and they paid cash for ‘em, full price. And which has not just quite happened, but will be shortly.
MW: Sure.
BS: When they dry up all of these lands, people will move out. Now since they bought it in 1985 they’ve never put a can of paint on anything, so stuff to some extant is falling apart. But I was very, very much interested in the farming of things, and that carried on through…
MW: Did farmer’s have enough water in the ditches, here in the ‘30s? BS: Not every year.
MW: ‘Cause if the drylanders were in real trouble…
BS: Not every year, but uh…they got through, they did not have the extant of irrigation laws that they have now, there were some, but it was very, very few. And uh, I remember…every
weekend, every Sunday my father and I would go out to the farms, we’d start out. As a little boy I used to do this, and I’d say all through the twenties and the thirties up to college, and all of that. Of course, when I was going to school in Boulder I didn’t come home every weekend. I’d
occasionally come over. But uh, so I was very close to agricultural interests there. And uh, I was…when my father died, I had all this responsibility and everything on my back, and I had two sisters, one was [inaudible at 563] right across from the house there, and my other sister, she lived in Texas and Wyoming, she [inaudible at 564]. Now’s in a nursing home in La Hoya [? at
565]. So I took care of her stuff…so I don’t know what else.
MW: Well, I just want to wrap this up by saying W.D. talked about how, you know, everybody talks about how the dryland farmers were hit so hard, Dust Bowl, but that the lack of volume of water in the rivers was really tough on farmers here, and that that’s what triggered the irrigation well movement, as well as the Colorado-Big Thompson. But I wonder if you could just say something real quick about how people talked about the Colorado-Big Thompson. Was that something that people had been talking about a long time?
BS: Bill Farr was very close to it. He was one of the promoters of it. And he…Floyd Merrill, of the Greeley Tribune, Charlie Hansen of the Tribune, and they…there were some other people that…Bill Farr was the foremost of it. And he was on that board basically from the time they started in 1940 on it.
MW: What was the explanation for its need? BS: That we didn’t have enough water.
MW: But it was going to be so huge, and so many districts. No one had ever thought of that big a scale, I understand.
BS: That’s right. Of course, they passed that act enabling the water conservation districts. Now a lot of the farms got that; my father only signed up for it on one farm, and had it just west of Greeley under the Greeley-Loveland. And uh, during the war he sold that. He sold the farm…because he couldn’t handle them. And they…it’s been somewhat that way with me, I can’t…I do go out once a week, every Saturday morning now I go out to the farms. But not this time of year.
MW: Would it be fair to say that the CBT saved this area?
BS: Yes, yes. Yes. For instance, where are you today on [inaudible at 589]. Now Mrs. Coldwater, the secretary here, she’s a very interesting person as to what she’s doing now on ditches. I started her working for me when she was still in high school. She actually now, she’s secretary for Greeley number 3 ditch, which runs right through town. And she’s secretary for the Union Ditch Company, which is down there at La Salle, east of La Salle mainly. Their headgate is down there just down the river a little ways from Twin Bridges, and she’s secretary of the Union Reservoir Company, which is over by Longmont, out at St. Vrain. And the other one, very recently, the Platte Valley Irrigation Company.
MW: Oh, yes. They’re in the news.
BS: Yes. And that’s still having lots and lots of problems. In the farming business, you know what happens in a budget crisis. The economics of the farming are most difficult to carry through, and if you have bad weather or something, that kind of thing, you’re in trouble. Now, the Platte Valley Irrigation Company had a good priority on the river, but it was a big ditch, but not that early. So it always ran out of water in the last part of July. By contract they got Denver’s sewage water, and that sewage water, they rented it, and about 1940 Denver was beginning to get, running out of water, so they decided to re-drink their sewer water. Run it through again, you know.
MW: Yessss.
BS: And, so they cut the Platte Valley off, [inaudible at 609]. So the Platte Valley, with the foresight, god knows who had it, but their directors signed up for 10,300 units, acre-foot units you know, of project water.
MW: CBT.
BS: CBT. And they recently have been having lots and lots and lots of meetings, and what the hell they’re going to do. And the end result of it is that a lot of the farmers, due to the economics
of what you could sell your stuff for, to grow, are going further and further into debt. And they, so she was…one day she told me that she had $83 million dollars in that acre. Now you multiply that just by the basic $10,000 a unit now, times 10,300, that’s several hundred million. And uh, so they’ve gone through lots of reorganization. I’m not party to that.
MW: Sure. So each unit now is worth $10,000 apiece? BS: $13,000.
MW: $13,000?
BS: They sold some, at the high price of any of it, was sold at $18,000. MW: The highest price was?
BS: And how much did it cost ‘em? $0. All they had to do was sign up for it. And then they pay a $1.50 a year for the water. Per unit. But the project and the conservancy district act very greatly restrict what they can do and use with their water.
MW: These are amazing stories. And because, you know, Greeley and this area has changed so much. I’d like to, if you don’t mind, I’d like to cut off now. I’ve got another meeting. I
understand you have an 11:00…
